The present inventive concept relates to a gas injection apparatus and thin film deposition equipment including the same, and more particularly to a gas injection apparatus, which can sequentially supply a substrate with at least two kinds of source gases reacting with each other in a container, and thin film deposition equipment including the gas injection apparatus.
As a known thin film deposition process in a semiconductor manufacturing method, a first source gas is absorbed onto a surface of a substrate under vacuum and a supplied gas is converted into a second source gas to form a single-layered or multi-layered atomic or molecular layer(s) by a reaction of gases taking place on the substrate surface, which are performed multiple times, thereby allowing a thin film to grow on the substrate. This process is referred to as an atomic layer deposition (ALD) or a molecular layer deposition (MLD). Since a film thickness can be controlled according to the number of cycles with high accuracy and a layer in a plane demonstrates high uniformity, the ALD or MLD process is expected as a promising method for effectively coping with the thinning tendency of a semiconductor device.
As one of the thin film deposition methods, a process is being researched and examined, in which a source gas is supplied from an upper side of a substrate using a single type thin film deposition equipment having a gas shower head provided at a top center of a vacuum container and unreacted source gas and reaction byproducts are exhausted from a lower side of the container. According to this process, however, when the first source gas is converted into the second source gas and when the second source gas is converted into the first source gas vice versa, a relatively long time is taken in performing purging using a purge gas and a deposition time is prolonged due to several hundreds of purging cycles being performed. Accordingly, apparatuses and methods for achieving a high throughput are needed or required.
In order to solve the aforementioned problems, a thin film deposition apparatus is proposed, the thin film deposition apparatus configured and driven such that 4 sheets of wafers are equidistantly arranged on a substrate support (or a turntable), first source gas discharge nozzles and second source gas discharge nozzles are equidistantly arranged to face the substrate support in a rotating direction, separating gas nozzles are arranged between each of the nozzles, and the substrate support is horizontally rotated.
According to the turntable type ALD apparatus, purging of the first source gas and the second source gas and purging using the purge gas are not necessarily performed, thereby achieving a high throughput. Meanwhile, the first source gas and the second source gas are supplied to a vacuum container at the same time. Therefore, it is necessary to propose techniques for suppressing the first and second source gases from being intermixed and reacting with each other in the vacuum container.